dialogue humor that sold as gramophone records. But radio 
and the talking pictures were not kind to the monologue, even 
when it was made by W. C. Fields or Will Rogers. These hot 
media pushed aside the cooler forms that TV has now brought 
back on a large scale. The new race of night-club entertainers 
(Newhart, Nichols and May) have a curious early-telephone 
flavor that is very welcome, indeed. We can thank TV, with its 
call for such high participation, that mime and dialogue are 
back. Our Mort Sahls and Shelley Bermans and Jack Paars are 
almost a variety of “living newspaper,” such as was provided 
for the Chinese revolutionary masses by dramatic teams in the 
1930s and 1940s. Brecht’s plays have the same 
participational quality of the world of the comic strip and the 
newspaper mosaic that TV has made acceptable, as pop art.

     The mouthpiece of the telephone was a direct outgrowth